doggdot.us

Sunday, November 26, 2006

diggdot.us is now called doggdot.us

diggdot.us has been around for exactly a year. I put it together one day because I found myself hitting d*gg.com, del.icio.us/popular and slashdot.org many times a day and was tired of seeing duplicate stories. I put the site up on frozenbear.com, and the next day it showed up on d*gg.com and the top of del.icio.us/popular. Nothing fancy at all. I'm sure most of d*gg's readers could write the same site in a day. But it seemed to strike a chord as many other geeks out there were going through the same daily rotation of those three sites. The site has a small following and we've tried to do our part to add to the community of geeks sharing and talking about tech news.

Fun times. Seems pretty harmless. We're promoting the source sites. I don't think there is much confusion surrounding my website. It's not affiliated with any of the source sites and I think that's pretty clear to our audience.

Fast forward one year (a few weeks ago). We get a cease & desist letter from d*gg's lawyers. We're not the only ones. A few other d*gg community sites (diggcard.com, digggames.com, digg2phone.com) have received the same letter and have shut down. It sucks seeing those other sites shut down. There are probably a few hundred more cease & desist letters in transit to other d*gg community sites right now.

We don't want to shut anyone down (not even the clone sites), all we ask is that you avoid using the name 'digg' in your website names/domains. We're looking to see if we have any other options.

I tried contacting him (I couldn't find his address and tried going through d*gg's feedback address) to see how he's doing on those other options. No luck; I received no response from him or d*gg.

So, best of luck to the hundreds of domains that have "digg" in their names. A lot of people have put in a lot of time to enhance the d*gg community by creating these sites. Some will just go away. Others, like mine, will change their name and see if that keeps d*gg's lawyers content. In the end, I don't know what it will do to d*gg's community of fans and developer-fans. It's left a bad taste in my mouth.

In any case, feel free to read some tech news at the freshly named doggdot.us.